Isabel Healthcare Blog

DDX tools could help to avoid diagnosis errors in the ICU

The idea for the Isabel diagnosis support tool first came to us while sitting in the ICU. A decade ago, my family and I were spending long hours in the ICU caring for our toddler, Isabel Maude, after she was diagnosed late with necrotising fasciitis. We realized the ICU doctors often can see the long perspective of what happened to a patient, as they see how the patient got there and what mistakes were made along the way. With the luxury of hindsight they can see, for example, that if only a clinician had, metaphorically, turned left instead of right then the patient would not have ended up in ICU.

The
Isabel diagnosis tool touts an extensive database of conditions for differential diagnosis support, and we often will test its accuracy with real patient cases from the New England Journal of Medicine.

About the Isabel Diagnosis Challenge

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) publishes interesting presentations of common diseases and unusual cases in the Clinical pathology Conference (CPC) series. These cases are educational and can pose diagnostic challenges even to the expert physicians at the Massachusetts General Hospital.